Fishing is a lot of things to a lot of people. If you ask a fishing enthusiast why they fish, they’re most probably going to tell you that they do it for fun. Sitting by a beautiful body of water while waiting for your meal to come to you can be a relaxing hobby. However, you might not hear that exact same answer from a seasoned fisherman. Anyone who fishes for a living knows that if you want to catch your target successfully, you’re going to have to do more than lounge around with a stick in hand. It may look like a simple feat, but tenured fisherfolk will be the first to educate you about the importance of strategies.
Creating a product and positioning a brand is similar to fishing.
It may seem like it to the naive business person, but marketing is never only coming up with a poster, putting it up a storefront, and hoping that customers give in. To ensure that your products or services thrive with your market segment, you need to speak their language. In other words, you need to be acquainted with who they are, how they think, what their needs are, and what they do and don’t enjoy, and the best way to define and determine these things is by creating user personas.
Meet your market
Considering the many aspects startup founders and new business leaders have to get their hands on, one might no longer find the need to integrate user personas into their marketing strategies. But to fully humanize your audience, marketing experts encourage entrepreneurs to take the time to do so. Because user personas create realistic and dependable representations of your target market, it becomes much easier to devise sales strategies and determine marketing efforts.
These personas come in handy in many phases of your brand’s development process, as these can:
- Be used to write relatable copies
- Establish attractive UIs
- Outline user flows
- Define brand positioning
- Determine direct competitors
- Finalize intricate wireframes
Simply put, an accurate research persona is derived from well-studied research, which then eliminates assumptions and estimations out of brand ideation. There are dozens of ways to familiarise your audience, but the best way is by talking to them directly. As such, a casual, outlined conversation is the best and most effective method to profile users.
However, if your product development is at its fetal stages and you don’t have prospects you can study yet, refer to your competition’s market and interview them instead. It’ll take roughly 5 to 35 respondents until you start noticing a trend. Once you’ve captured a pattern, analyze and structure your data to arrive at a thorough conclusion. Based, then, on this data, you should be able to come up with about three to four user personas.
Here are three aspects you can focus us on to create useful and accurate user personas
Who are they?
Establish the basics. Find out a person’s background details, and put a premium on those things. These bits of information help you understand your market’s socio and economic bearings. For instance, determine the demographic and geographic environment of your user. Because this is a behavioural profile, every detail matters.
How do they identify as? What are their pronouns? What do they do for a living?
Knowing these precise details helps you better cement a solid foundational understanding of your target market.
What interests them?
This is a fundamental aspect you will forever need to remain relevant. What keeps them interested? What motivates them? What shows do they love and hate? What humor do they subscribe to? What challenges do they face daily? Ask questions that highlight your user’s answers in the context of your industry.
For instance, if you’re building a medical app, ask how often they reach out to a health worker, where they usually go for quick health-related advice, where they purchase their medicines and vitamins, and what kinds of traits they look for in a field expert. On the other hand, if the software you’re building is related to eCommerce, focus on their shopping behaviours. What items do they deem necessary, and what things do they consider to be comforting?
All these will help you better come up with marketing and sales initiatives in the future.
What are their whys?
This question aims to understand their intentions and motives. Once you’ve determined the answers to the questions above, knowing why these are their answers gives you a complete preview to their reasoning.
Why do some users prefer item 1 over item 2? Why are they most likely to purchase its four on a specific day?
Knowing the answers to these questions also helps you better understand if they’re going to patronize what you have to offer or not. If your services aren’t available to the public yet, ask your interviewees what could make them change their mind and switch to another product.
Conclusion
Recognizing user personas is an integral part of your product development direction. When you know their whats and whys, you’re more able to build a product that’s designed to serve your market. By giving them something they genuinely need and look forward to acquiring, you eliminate many what-ifs.
Entrepreneurship can already feel risky in itself. The last thing you’d want to be is unprepared and unfamiliar with the audience you think you’d be selling to.
The more specifically geared your products and marketing efforts are to a particular group of people, the higher your chances of successfully penetrating an industry.
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